I’ve been using LaTeX since 2013 now, and I still love it. It creates amazingly high-quality documents. The one irritating thing is the large number of files that the LaTeX compiler generates in the root directory of the document. How can I get rid of them?!

I use KDE Plasma as my desktop environment and spend lots of time in Dolphin to manage my files. Dolphin is just fantastic, right? It’s even better than you think. See the following image.

On the left is a directory containing a LaTeX document, with all the generated files that are so distracting. On the right is a copy of the same document, but all those files are missing. That’s what I needed!

So how can you get this done? Very simply, thanks to Dolphin. You just create a file named .hidden (remember the dot in front) in the root directory of your LaTeX document and list all the files that you want to be hidden inside. Here is the .hidden file of the example on the right above.

If you want to hide more files, just add them to the .hidden file. It’s that simple!

You can use this in any folder with any combination of files on your Linux machine if you are using the KDE Plasma desktop with Dolphin. You can use wildcards to specify file patterns to hide as well.

If you want to show all the hidden files in the directory from time to time, and you don’t want to delete your .hidden file, you can just press Alt-. (Alt-dot) on the keyboard. Voilà, they’re back! Pressing Alt-. again, of course